Friday, June 03. 2011

PostgreSQL 8.4 introduced the ability to create user-defined variadic functions. These are basically
functions that take as input an undefined number of arguments where the argument that is an undefined number are all of the same type and are the last input arguments. Depesz went over it two years ago in Waiting for 8.4 variadic functions,
so we are a bit late to the party. In a nutshell -- variadic functions are syntactic sugar for functions that would otherwise take arrays. In this article we'll provide some more demonstrations of them to supplement Depesz article.

I was reminded that I had never explored this feature, when recently documenting one of the
new PostGIS 2.0 Raster functions - ST_Reclass which employs this feature.
I think ST_Reclass is a superb function and one of my favorite raster functions thus far that I hope to put to good use soon. Our new PostGIS family member,Bborie Park, is running thru our
PostGIS Raster milestones much faster than I had dreamed. He's already implemented a good chunk of stuff we discussed in Chapter 13 - PostGIS Raster and had stated you probably won't see in PostGIS 2.0. He's
going a bit faster than I can catalog them, so the documentation is already embarrassingly behind the fantastic functionality that is already present in PostGIS 2.0.